An Open Letter to Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan,
It looks like all this is coming up again. Jodi's smartly staying out of this one, it seems, but Jennifer Weiner is being both logical and hilarious about the whole thing. Of course your name is coming up. Your name is front and centre because you're now the boy everyone loves to hate. Even the boys hate you^*, for being so ubiquitous, for being the projected Great American Novelist, for being so successful based on one (in my opinion) really great book. That book, of course, was not Freedom. Maybe your picture is on the dart-board because you failed to deliver?

When I wrote my letter to Jodi Picoult, I said this:

So maybe I just don't know enough of your work. But have you read Franzen? He's really, really good. So is Lethem. Some of the Wonderboys the NYT loves aren't all that, but those two? They kinda are. You are not now and will never be in the same league.

While she is still horrible, I no longer feel like calling you great. You got all the attention and the hype and the Time cover, and I admit, I was really, really excited about Freedom. But boy-o, you sure let me down.

I've steered people away from Freedom. People who only marginally liked The Corrections I've told that they won't see anything better with your follow up. Those who liked The Corrections I've warned that Freedom is a great big comedown. I had a post half-written about it, but it stuck in the queue for a long, long time. Finally, I deleted it. Perhaps I shouldn't have, so I could now expound the ways in which Freedom failed to live up to the hype. All I can say now, is that it's full of stupid awful cliches, and even if that's the point (if given "freedom" people will still fall into predictable habits) it's no good in the overlong trip getting there. The fetishisation of the Oriental Other, the younger woman, the brainy-yet-earthy antidote to the ol' slag wife, was a particularly egregious touch. Perhaps I was hasty saying you and Picoult would never be in the same league.

Freedom fell into that special snowflake area; we gave you all the accolades and magazine covers just for coming out. You were supposed to be the great bespectacled hope, and you fizzled. After the initial rush of "OH THE NEW FRANZEN!" how many people have good things to say about it^**? In retrospect, is anyone loaning out their copy of Freedom saying "You have to read this!" like I do with The Corrections^†? You have your money, like Jennifer Weiner, so you don't need to care, or so the articles say. But you lost me, man, and I'm pissed off I ever stuck up for you.

Further Reading.
Further Reading pt II.
^*Text of the relevant bits:

First things first: Murder is wrong, OK? But let's say, hypothetically, that you're considering committing one anyway: how would you do it? Practically everyone wants to murder someone. That jerk that got the job you want. That guy who gets all his books reviewed while your books don’t even get published. That handsome, horrible dude everyone loves when only you know he is a complete fraud who must be exposed. Jonathan Franzen. Maybe you want to murder novelist Jonathan Franzen. Let’s say you do. You want to stand over Jonathan Franzen's wrecked body as it bubbles over with his own blood. You’re laughing and he’s just kind of lying there, gurgling. You beat him to death with an iPad and now there won’t be any more sprawling family angst novels from Mr. Handsome Fake Genius Man. Maybe that is who you want to murder. Maybe you would really enjoy wringing his skinny Brooklyn neck. His skinny, pretentious, overrated, Brooks Brothers neck. Hypothetically. Here are some things to think about while you're totally planning the fake murder you have no intention of actually doing and by reading this sentence you hereby absolve the writer of any complicity in the crimes you will in no way go out and commit here comes the period and Jim is absolved.

^**That's a real question. Do you have good things to say about Freedom? Tell me in the comments.
^†Doing some link jumping, it looks like popular opinion is starting to sour on The Corrections too. It would be worth a reread because it definitely is fashionable to hate on Franzen just now, and that probably colours things.

And maybe some of this...

The School Visit

I have lingering flu weird head space. So forgive some wandering in this post. I've been living on Green Juice for days.

When I was in the 10^th grade we had a Real! Live! Author! come give a talk to the budding writers among us. It was totally optional to go, and there were probably about 20 students collected in the library to hear her talk. I'd just handed in a short story that had received an unusually high mark (and I've probably not written any fiction as good since), and was told that I should go as well. So there I was.

The author was Elona Malterre. You might not have heard of her. Certainly the other students hadn't. But by some weird twist, I had. My Dad had bought and read her book, The Celts^*. Since I was constantly raiding my Dad's library, I'd read it too. This was my encounter with a Real! Live! Author!, and I still remember thinking "Well if I'd have known it was her, I'd have brought the book for her to sign!" I was actually pretty thrilled to meet someone whose work I'd read. I'm still that way, and I'm totally in awe that people I call friends are Real! Live! Authors! It seems like a sort of magic to me, to be able to create a whole book.

Since this was 20 years ago, I don't remember terribly much. However, Malterre said one thing that has always stuck with me. She told us that every book has a time in your life. Even if you start a book and can't finish it, set it aside and pick it up again next year. Or the year after. As you grow and change, your perspective will be different, and that book will mean something new. She told us never to force yourself to finish a book, just wait until the time is right for you and that book. This was powerful advice. There have been a few books in my life (some Great Literature, some not) that haven't thrilled me on first, second, or third try, but when the time was right, I'd tear through them. The best example from my own life is The Crystal Cave, which I tried to read about five times between the 7^th grade and University. Maybe it was all the Arthurian revival stuff I was reading in my Victorian poetry class, but things finally clicked, I spent a thrilling couple days with the book in 1996.

Sadly, I don't read like I used to. I finish almost^** every book I start, owing mostly to my extensive use of the Toronto Public Library system, and the books don't have time to match my mood, or life path, or whatever. It no longer happens that I have no next-book scheduled and instead must peruse my shelves (or box of mass markets) for that book I didn't finish, but wouldn't give away (and there are still of few of those sitting there, so sadly neglected). I keep buying, too, and that pile just grows and grows. I still value what Elona Malterre said, though. It's great advice. I pass it on to others, when I can.

This post was sparked by an author who also does school visits, Jill Murray, and her post today on Bookmadam about how authors pay the bills. I don't know how common school visits are; I only ever remember having that one (my distant foggy elementary school past thinks we might have had one there too, but it was Calgary, and we didn't have a lot of local published talent). I think it's a great idea though, and something that really benefits the kids who get to participate. I didn't realise it was something authors did to supplement their income, but people need to be paid for their time, and to my mind, it's money well spent.

^*I don't know where he came across it, and if it was just some freaky coincidence that she happened to be a local author. He and I both did most of our book shopping, at the time, in used bookstores, so the mass market paperback copy we had probably came from there. Sorry, Elona!
^**Picoult is just really that bad.

This Again (In Defence of the Humble Worker)

So often on book blogs, and book news sites, I see people complain about the chain bookstore employee. About how dull and stupid they are, what a crime it is they can't spell "Ondaatje," how tragic that the bookstore employee encountered can't read minds/hasn't read what you're looking for/doesn't know your favourite author. Whenever I see it, I'm not shy about yelling at the author of such comments.

During a morning meeting at Chapters, near the beginning of my time there, one of my managers said "Even if you read a book a week, that's only 52 books a year. Look around you. There's no possible way you will ever read even a tiny percentage of the books here in your lifetime. So when customers are frustrated that you don't know exactly which book they're vaguely talking about — and they will be — it's not your fault." We'd do the best we could to help customers. Most times we didn't have to work too hard to get it right; people are generally looking for popular books and showing them the best-seller shelf usually did the trick.

Chain or not, bookstore employees are usually readers. Maybe we weren't all chomping down on Dostoevsky, but we read. A lot of folks I worked with had post-secondary degrees (as do I), of the sort that don't have real practical applications. Yet there's an inherent classism that happens when some people enter a chain bookstore. The retail grunts can't possibly be human, right? "They don't really care about books, I mean, look at all these candles... oooooh lavendar!"^* Fact is, your local Chapters/Indigo employee is probably pretty passionate about books, and reading. Sure, there's the odd person who's doing it solely for the paycheque (and that's totally fair too), but for readers who work retail, there's no better place to do it.

I worked at the Chapters location mentioned in the recent Eye Weekly article "In defence of Chapters." Unfortunatley, the piece does suffer from the same prejudice I mention above. Sarah Nicole Prickett writes "They make no suggestions, having nothing to prove; they work at Chapters." The implicit message is that they couldn't possibly care about literature, they work in a big box. She goes on to say that while spending time at Chapters "[t]he only risk is running into someone with a normal job, like in corporate PR or helping children[.]" Because, you know, people who work retail aren't really "normal" or "people" or any of that. Maybe I'm taking this a bit on the chin, but Prickett isn't defending anything here, other than her need to go to Chapters and casually rip up magazines (and actually, yes, they do mind when you do that, that's called "loss" and stores don't like it).

Given all this, it was nice to see that chain bookstores really can mean something. When the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Sqaure closed, the employees left a heartfelt note in the window. Patrons, who had come to treasure this big store, and the people it employed, wrote back.

Click for larger version

^*The number of people who would complain to frontline employees about the selection of non-book items in Chapters/Indigo was pretty hilarious. You think those folks have anything to do with the decision making? Or that they have a direct line to Reisman/Silver (is Silver still around)? Please. Fact is, the margins are better on that stuff, and it's what keeps the stores in business.

The Nature of Blog

I've had this post about Freedom sitting in the queue for weeks now, needing to be tied together, edited, and published. I haven't looked at it since I wrote the first draft in a frenzy of undergrad-like motif spotting. Which is often what I do here; write tiny, not-great undergrad papers. Partially I do this because I'm not sure how else to write about books; I don't know how to write a real review, though I do respect those who can. I feel like I don't have enough adjectives. I also don't just want to rehash those reviews. I want to bring something else to the table. With the Freedom post, I feel like I've caught onto something that reviewers missed, but I've written about it on such an elementary academic level, I'm a little hesitant about putting it up. Because, who cares, really? This is a blog, not a class. I've been told that the way I write about books can sometimes be difficult for the reader, because it relies so much on familiarity with the text. That's a fair assessment, and I don't deny it. Again, it's just my default of writing papers, something I enjoyed a lot, but haven't done for a grade in ten years.

I know I just need to write, for the practice. I find that my more successful blog posts (successful meaning interesting, insightful, thoughtful, maybe funny) have been written without too much thought. They were initial reactions, with a little research, maybe a couple pull quotes. This makes sense, when I think about how I wrote all those A papers: the night before, or the day they were due, from scratch. I'm good under pressure, good on my feet, better off-the-cuff. So I have to endeavour to do that; not over-think, just write.

One of the problems I'm encountering, with just getting it down, is the weird editorial board I seem to have contracted. I do advertise new blog posts on my Twitter, and almost every time the first commentary I get is a spelling, punctuation, or grammar correction. (It's always a man, not always the same man, that does this. I don't know what to make of that precisely, but I don't think it's just a coincidence^*.) When I posted about Fauna a Twitter pal immediately launched into refutation mode, citing books written about Calgary. When I angrily suggested he was missing the whole point of the post, he admitted he hadn't even read it, he was just commenting on the title. And then I made this face: >_<

I started this blog, like so many do, because I simply love books. Reading is integral to my personhood. Boyfriend put new shelves up for me the other day and now I can see a small percentage of my books from my bed, and I'm filled with a sense of comfort and happiness every time I look at them. So I started writing here because I wanted to talk about books. Then I quit talking about books for a while. Then I wanted to talk about them again. My model has always been Pickle Me This^**, and though I know I'll never be half the reader or writer Kerry is, the way she writes about living with books, not only about their content, is something I strongly identify with. I wish I could post multiple times a week, but I just don't have the content in me. I want to post about everything I read, but I never do. Sometimes I just have nothing to say about a book, like A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I just finished, enjoyed a lot, and then put away. What's to say? Egan is amazing. The end.

Thanks to Kerry, I'm currently reading Ex Libris. If she is "startlingly unoriginal in loving Anne Fadiman’s books of essays, not to mention about a decade late" then I'm not sure what rock I've been living under to have never heard of them till now. Fadiman and I agree on a lot of things: a well-used book is a loved book, annotating is a good thing, finding unexpected bits of paper in a book is a joy (I love when people leave their library slips in books, so I can see what else they've read), and so forth. I do envy Fadiman her hyper-intellectual upbringing, I'm a little annoyed with how often she name drops Mark Helprin, and I'd probably stab myself in my eye if a friend ever said the following to me:

I had repaired to the King's Arms, the pub closest to the Bodleian Library, with a fellow student, a dashing but bullheaded young Scotsman who proclaimed over coffee that Homer was vastly inferior to Virgil. As a Homeric partisan, I was much miffed[.]^†

I'm hoping this is a caricature, but even still, I don't find it an endearing one. Anyway, I'm mostly positive about Ex Libris, because it does what I want to do here: discuss how books shape my life, how I interact with them, how they make me feel, how I react, where they lead me, how their physicality touches me, and how reading is now -- and will ever be -- the most important thing in my life. The writing comes much further down the list.

^*I'm sure I'm going to catch shit for reporting this, in this way, but it's the truth. No woman has ever (metaphorically) fallen upon me shouting "Oxford comma!" If pointing out errors is seen as a way to enter into the discussion, without having a literary framework, that's a flawed approach.
^**I'm sure I've said this before, several times probably.
^†Really, who talks like this?! I sort of thought, "Well, if she's maybe British..." but no, the friend is American. If accurate, this is inexcusable affectation.

I Think I Got a C- in Critical Theory Class

There's a problem with finishing a book I really, really love: I have a hard time starting anything else. I stopped and started about four different books before I was able to get into Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, which I picked up at the big Ithaca book sale in May. No idea why I bought that particular book there, since it's available in multitudes in every used book store everywhere. I'm odd. And yet, even after that, I was still stuck on I Love Dick.

This is long (for a blog post, but extremely brief for a real analysis), and I'm trying to twist my way through some theory that's new to me. It's probably nonsensical because I'm still trying to grasp so many things. Critical Theory has never been my strong suit, but I'm so intensely fascinated with it, after reading I Love Dick, that I can't help but try.

I love I Love Dick so much that I bought my own copy off Amazon, just so I could re-read and annotate it. I love I Love Dick so much that I tried, and failed, to find an email address for Chris Kraus so I could tell her how much that book meant to me. I Love Dick makes me want to read everything else Kraus has written, go back to school, and write a Master's thesis on her. And I love I Love Dick so much that I felt I had to come back and write more about it, since I basically just used it to introduce my thoughts on Russell Smith in a previous post. Yet writing this post, I know I still can't do it any justice. I really would need so much more space, and time, and education to even get close. What follows is what currently has my brain spinning.

Early on, Kraus writes about herself in the third person:

Chris was not a torture victim, not a peasant. She was an American artist, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was was her specificity. By writing Dick [the person, or the book?] she was offering her life as Case Study.

Throughout, Kraus introduces the reader to other case studies in love, but what these studies really are, and what they become, are introductions to the lives of individuals. Some of these people are artists, and thus possibly recognizable to people -- unlike me -- who know something about the art world. Some are activists, or writers. Some are "regular" people. It's possible, too, that some are entirely fictional. Because I Love Dick is memoir-as-fiction, it's purposely difficult, within the realm of this text only, to guess at the "authenticity" of the accounts, and it's possible that one shouldn't. In writing this book, Kraus brings into existence lives unknown to the reader, including her own. In other words, by writing to Dick, she writes herself into existence.

In the afterword, Joan Hawkins notes:

And while Kraus doesn't quote Guattari until late in the text, his presence is already felt in the first letter. In fact, what's interesting is Chris' idea that you can somehow use Baudillard's notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Delueze and Guattari's notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.

Simulacrum is a new concept to me, but if my novice (and rusty theoretical) reading is correct, Kraus plays with the notion that "real" lives might not exist until they become a form of hyper-real, lived through life, through the author, then finally reader. The Wikipedia entry on Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra and Simulation states that "today there is no such thing as reality" Our world is one "in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced." When Kraus writes about a life, in a fictional way, it is a reproduction of a life lived, which is made more real with every reading, by a stranger, of each or every life. Each printing, or reproduction, of I Love Dick is an affirmation of these lives. While it is Baudrillard's opinion that hyper-reality renders experience meaningless, I feel that in working with a text like I Love Dick, simulacra can create an authentically meaningful experience for a reader who might not have had the opportunity otherwise.

There's an interesting typo that happens repeatedly -- but not consistently -- which I have to think is intentional: Kraus often confuses "it's" and "its." There is, I think, a purposeful mutability between "possessing" and "being" throughout I Love Dick. Dick is angry that he has become part of Chris' story ("I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing") but does Chris not own Dick, if she brings him into being (as postulated above)? Only through her authorial ownership, do Dick and the others exist.


* * *
Speaking of ownership, I tweeted the following, which some viewers found disturbing:
"I love cracking a spine so the book can lay flat for me to copy from it."
I get that some people like to keep their books more pristine, but as I said in my next tweet "I live with books. I mark them, I crease them, I use them and they look it. Dog-eared and underlined. LOVED."^* I sometimes sleep with books beside me, and they get rolled on. I carry books with me, and they get banged up. It's interesting, the differences in how we treat our books, as book lovers. I don't think one approach is better than any other. The way we love books is as individual as the books we choose to love.

^*I do want to note, as I did on Twitter, that I only do this to books in my personal collection; I try very hard to keep library books in the condition in which they were loaned to me.

The Deck

I finished The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot a couple weeks back. I couldn't help comparing it to Eat, Pray, Love, with all the new age-y reflections on life, and how one can go about improving one's future.

Kimberlee Auerbach is more down-to-earth than Elizabeth Gilbert, and thus, easier to identify with. The stories in her book weren't funded by a large publisher advance (though she likely got one), and she's not wealthy in the book (even though she comes from, and probably had more money than I do, it doesn't come across that way). Auerbach doesn't go around the world to find herself, she does it in the New York apartment of a tarot card reader^*. Her family is messed up, like most families are, and she's not afraid to talk about it. She's not fabulous, she's an everywoman. And she's deeply funny, and incredibly thoughtful. All this makes Auerbach far more likeable than Gilbert, and makes the book a fast, interesting, and ultimately joyful read.

And yet... Gilbert is the superior writer. Reading The Devil, the Lovers, and Me is like having coffee with a great friend. Eat, Pray, Love transports the reader to exotic locales, where possibilities are open and endless. This, of course, is why Eat, Pray, Love is so successful, both in its writing and in its sales. Gilbert knows how to manipulate the reader, to force you to root for her, to join her on the crazy voyage. Gilbert's character isn't someone I'd easily get behind, in fiction or in life, but it speaks to the excellence of her writing that I did, in each and every page. I fear The Devil... won't have the same success, because it's more mundane.

I have no complaints about Auerbach's writing; I did enjoy the book thoroughly. I think she's got a lot of talent, and further books -- I do hope for more -- should hone that talent into something more magical. That thing that Gilbert has in spades.

* * *

Bookslut makes me laugh:

My favorite of [Penguin’s Great Loves] series is The Eaten Heart: Unlikely Tales of Love by Boccaccio. Boccaccio was an influence on Chaucer. That tells you how smart I feel when I drop Boccaccio’s name in casual conversation. It goes a little like this:
Stranger: Hey, lady, you’re parked in two spots! You suck!
Me: I’m reading Boccaccio! He was an influence on Chaucer!
Stranger: Move your damn car.

Callie Miller at Counterbalance has a post on a chair and ottoman, that also hold your books^**. I guess it's that kind of week.






^**Auerbach admits in her end papers that the tarot reader, and reading, in her book is a composite of tarot readers and readings she's had over the years. No surprise, since it's not likely you'd recount your entire life story over the course of one evening. Makes for an easy transition to screenplay though (oh, I'm such a cynic).
^**$7,000!

Just Some Cool Stuff

I've always dreamt of living in a space with 12, 15-foot bookshelves, with a ladder on wheels to roll between them. There's a loft in Kensington Market that has such a thing (sorry for peeking in your windows all the time, lofters!). Though this just might replace the classic library in my dreams. It's a bookshelf staircase^*! I think my heart stopped.

The Book Inscriptions Project is another one of those things I really wish I'd thought of (like Seen Reading). I think I've already mentioned how much I love used books for the notes I'll sometimes find in the margins. I'll write notes back, often, to the mystery author. I'll wonder if they used the book for a course, or were simply the sort of reader that has to respond to the text in the text. The Book Inscription Project also engages with these mystery writers, through the notes they leave for the recipient of the book. It's addictive reading, for me at any rate.
From the "about" section:

We collect personal messages written in ink (or pen or marker or crayon or grape jelly) inside books.
Pictures count. So do poems. So do notes on paper found in a book. The more heartfelt the better. [...] For whatever reason, I happened to open the book and saw the message from Mark to Joey.
Something about that note, handwritten by an unknown to an unknown of whose whereabouts,
gender and relationship I was unaware, struck me as both tragic and powerful. Since then I’ve been searching for more inscriptions and, after poring through thousands of books at garage sales, libraries and book sales, I now have a large and ever-growing collection.

Books That Make You Dumb correlates the favorite books of respondents, and their SAT scores^**. Here's how they did it:

1[...]download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent "favorite books" at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
2. Download the average SAT/ACT score (from CollegeBoard) for students attending every college.
3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

Books <=> Colleges <=> Average SAT Scores

4. Plot the average SAT of each book, discarding books with too few samples to have a reliable average.
5. Post the results on your website, pondering what the Internet will think of it.

My favourite book doesn't even make the list. I'm not sure what that says about me, so I'll assume it means my genius is off the charts. Heh.


^*via Bookninja
^**So, yes, it's based on U.S. info.